Stanley Cup Final: Once Again, Game 7

I was saying yesterday that there was a dubious form of racial stereotyping still just visible in basketball, emphasizing the “character” of galumphing, pasty-guy players. Unfortunately, in hockey, there’s a prejudice far less ashamed to speak it’s name: a stupid and sad open-season now on European players. The notion is that European players are “soft,” cowardly, and easily intimidated by North American bully-boys.

This is said even though it is obviously true that an indecent number of the iron men of the game have been Europeans and, as the recent history of the Detroit Red Wings shows, what keeps a dynasty running is steady injections of Russian and Swedish talent. The paladins of the playoffs, beginning with Nicklas Lidstrom and extending most recently to Antti Niemi last year, have been Europeans. This isn’t racial bigotry of course—aside from players like the Habs’ own peerless P. K. Subban, who does suffer from a fair amount of plain, old-fashioned racism—the issue doesn’t come up much in hockey because the field of players isn’t, from accidents of Northernism, diverse. Nonetheless, Mike Milbury—who, as general manager, took a once proud franchise, the Islanders, and turned it into one that is hanging on by the last scrape of its final fingernail from turning into the Quebec Neo-Nordiques—had the nerve, the other night, to mock the brilliant Swedish Sedin twins as “Thelma and Louise.” (Fortunately, Larry Brooks, in the Post, has said all the right things about Milbury.) And let us add to the indictment Canada’s own Don Cherry, who routinely disses fine European players, particularly Russians, while boosting any North American no matter how brutish their play. Although Canadians are on the whole the least bigoted people on earth, we can still produce some first-class bigotry, just as the Germans can produce one great seven-foot power forward.

Yet give the Bruins their due. Once again, they came out, in last night’s Game 6, seemingly out-manned and ready to surrender, and not only fought back but dominated what had seemed to be a pretty dominant Vancouver team. Tim Thomas has been unconscious, and plays that way: the standard-issue butterfly, which has closed down scoring so effectively, is alien to him. He jumps and flops and turns his back on the play in classic Gump Worsley fashion, like a goalie from the late fifties. And yet he wins. I still think that an excellent and doughty Bruins team is badly marred by their taste for bully hockey, and though I don’t think for a moment they get the benefit of the calls in any organized way, it is a truth of hockey that by raising the bar of every minute infraction you force the refs to call only the most flagrant ones. If you interfere on every other rush, they’ll only call the worst. (The Flyers, back when, grasped this principle, too.)

What will happen in Game 7? Will the home-and-home back and forth break down? If I were a betting man, I’d still bet on the ‘Nucks: Luongo plays in Boston like a defeated man, but then bounces right back up in B.C. I suspect that the exhaustion of the players on both teams after all these months of work is more intense than we can imagine, and that the presence of twenty thousand people screaming you on becomes less a positive extra than an absolute necessity for action. And then there was that fascinating statistical study that showed that the home-team advantage in sports is produced by unconscious referee bias: the human tropism towards conformity means that the refs see it the way the fans around them see it, without knowing that the fans are seeing it for them. That, at least, bodes well for Vancouver. And there is always the hypnotic effect of their boring sweater.

By the way, and speaking of western Canada, the re-migration of an N.H.L. hockey team, albeit not exactly the same one, back home to Winnipeg is a source of, well, some small pleasure, particularly because it neatly demonstrates what this awful Commissioner has spent a decade denying, namely, that it helps to have hockey teams in cities with winters. Let us hope that the Islanders hold on, though, and that the new or relaunched Quebec and Hamilton teams come from Florida or Phoenix or some other place that never really welcomed a (try and follow this, Gary) ice hockey team in the first place, being brought in only to sell some network on an imaginary national “footprint&#8221—this in a period when niche products are increasingly the only winning products. The possible names for the new team are enticing, too. It seems unlikely that “Jets” will be revived, but “Winnipeg Moose” has its charms, and its potential unboring sweaters, and another possibility, “Winnipeg Strikers”—referring to a famous general strike in the city back in the day—is, in this Koch Brothers union-busting era, positively seductive.

Let it also be said, and all traveling scribes be warned, as one married to one of Winnipegian heritage, that winter in Winnipeg is not like winter in any other city. Moscow is Honolulu by comparison—Montrealers in February welcome Manitobans who have flown in for a few days of warm Quebec weather. Snowbirds we call them. My beautiful mother-in-law once recalled literally crying in the cold while crossing the street in her Winnipeg maidenhood—and this is in the center of town. Still, there’s nothing I look forward to more than the day, following a likely conference realignment, when a Winnipeg-Montreal final—two tiny markets, one not even English speaking!—is won by the Habs, in seven good and fight-free games, and a distressed, frost-bitten Bettman has to hand the Cup to the Habs Russian assistant captain and then say a few words in French, while Milbury watches, mikeless. What was it the President said about the arc of justice being long but bending true? Or was that about his three-point shot?

Photograph: AP Photo/The Canadian Press/Jonathan Hayward.

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